The Messenger Read Online Free PDF

was really about.
    For the rest of the day, she tried to be like the Berliners. It was cool and windy, the leaves of the lindens starting to turn. The end of a hot summer. She walked around the inner city, avoiding the fabled shopping opportunities on the Ku-damm, and instead heading up to Friedrichstrasse and losing herself in the maze of streets around Hackescher Markt.
    Germany was like everywhere else, she decided. Maybe more ironic, but they had earned that the hard way. Riding on the S-Bahn, she saw the colors of skins and fabrics running the full range. There were women in saris and women in headscarves. They all avoided one another’s eyes. There were artists who’d just gotten out of bed. Retired couples returning from their visit to the doctor. There were the gray-faced ones who were still trying to adjust to the fall of the Wall, and then there were the invisible ones, the students and slackers and the lost, who sat in the corners, grabbed a smoke on the platform and were happy just to get through the moment. Always there were tourists—obese, obsessed with their waterproofed sun hats and digital cameras, maps bristling from every pocket.
    The German language was insane; she could catch only a few words. Uppermost in the news on this particular day was a financial scandal—photos of middle-aged politicians and energy magnates captured in casual conversation while walking across a busy street. Whatever they’d done didn’t translate, but it seemed more incriminating seen through a telephoto lens.
    She went into an Internet café and bought an excellent espresso and spent two euros to surf for a half hour, hoping to find a clue for her sudden mobilization. But beyond the latest environmental crisis and the continuing deterioration of the capitalist economies … there was nothing.
    She thought the choice of the Adlon odd. It was a famous hotel, certainly not the most invisible place. She had imagined a creaking walk-up in an immigrant ghetto. Maybe it was a real job interview? They could have decided she needed to acquire more cover.
    She ate street food and did everything with plenty of time to spare; showed up on time, dressed just as she would for a day at
Klic!
Hip but quality. A short skirt with black tights. Boots that looked strong and scuffed. A peacoat-inspired jacket, and an expensive blood-red top for the only touch of color.
    At the desk, they directed her to the suites Seyylol AG had booked for the interviews. When she knocked, the door was opened by a young man she had never met before. Very thin and yellow skinned. There was a sliver of chrome clamped to his ear and maybe he was listening to someone, but whatever, he couldn’t meet her eye. Or maybe it was the tights.
    “If you have a mobile?” He held out his hand, and she dropped her backpack down on a chair instead of giving it to him, draped the jacket over it.
    The young man walked away a few steps. “If you require tea,” he said, pointing to a table across the room. Then he went out of the room and down a short hallway. Across from her was a window, from which she could see the blocks of the Holocaust Memorial, a few lonely Jews wandering in and out of the labyrinth, indulging their grief over man’s inhumanity to man.
    A moment later and the young man was back. “This way,” he said.
    The man in the bedroom was a stranger. Over fifty, she would have guessed. A high crown of graying hair, white on the sides, barbered carefully around the ears. This was it, she realized.
    “Hello, Daria,” the man said. “I am honored to meet you.”
    “Hello.” She waited to see if he would take her hand. He didn’t.
    “Please sit. We do not have a lot of time. Your cousin tells me you are still committed?”
    “Yes,” she said. “I am.”
    “We have changed our tactics.” As he speaks to her he looks beyond her to the television, where a documentary about lions and water buffalo is playing.
    “You are intelligent and I’m certain